The dark reddish-brown burger sizzles when you toss it on the
grill. Slice it down the middle, and it shows pink at the
center. It leaves a residue of bloody juices on the plate —
but it doesn't include an ounce of real meat.

Impossible Foods, a
start-up from California, made this 100% plant-based
cheeseburger that tastes, looks, and drips "blood" like a beef
burger. It's so convincing that investors, including Bill Gates
and Swiss bank UBS, just backed
the Impossible Foods to the tune of $108 million.

The company says the burger —which includes a
mix of fats, proteins, and nutrients from plants, grains,
legumes, and amino acids — doesn't
contain cholesterol, antibiotics, or hormones. And
according to a few
early
tests, it supposedly tastes like real beef.

"Every molecule in our burger is something found in
nature," the company's CEO Patrick Brown said in
an interview with CNBC. Impossible Foods plans to
release the patties to the public by 2016.

If Impossible Foods'
cheeseburger really does taste like meat, it could shake up
the
$48 trillion global meat industry.

Farmers feed cattle millions
of tons of
cheap corn each year in the U.S. But corn, which
accounts for 95%
of feed, diminishes
healthy Omega-3 fatty acids in cattle and creates prime
conditions for E. Coli.

Similar start-ups, like Beyond Meat, have also
experimented with meat substitutes, making soy-based "chicken"
strips and taco-style ground "beef." In 2013, physiologist Mark
Post of the University of Maastricht created the world's first
cultured beef burger from thousands of individual muscle
tissue in a lab. Lab-grown meat burgers could be on sale in as
little as
5 years.

But if Impossible Foods wants to revolutionize
the way we produce and consume meat, it will need to make
its plant-based beef cheaper than real beef,
Andy Wheeler, one of the company's
partners, tells
Marketplace. Right now, one Impossible Foods burger costs $20 to
make, compared to
$2 for a normal burger.

Hopefully the burger will make the impossible possible and solve
the carnivore's dilemma.